Quotes from Laura Wiess

After school I all but ran to Gran's and it was funny how even with her so sick, being with her could still make me feel safe.

We wait to be rescued, but for whatever reason, no one comes. We figure that if no one protects us then we must not be worth protecting so we become prey and are easily picked off. Our wounded, kicked-puppy gazes attract sly predators and we sell ourselves for clearance sale prices, mistaking screwing for caring. We binge, purge, sleep around. We drink too much and get too high, anything to blot out the past.

There are only the three of us and our dark, burgeoning desires I am so afraid of what comes next

The weight in my pocket nudges my thigh, suddenly becomes my knife. I put my hand to its unforgiving outline and can't stop crying years of tears because if I don't stab my father with my weapon, then he is going to stab me with his.

No step is a safe one, so it's safer to take none at all.

I would not willingly peel back the scar tissue protecting the deepest chambers of my heart and reveal the bruised hollows pooled with the blood of old wounds – the terror comes just thinking about it – but now, facing darkness I am left with no choice. I love you, and because of that am going to try and raise the dead. – Louise Bell Closson, How It Ends

She smiles and slips her arm through his. Her tread is light and bouncy and I can almost see the ghost of her cheerleader's ponytail bobbing at the back of her head.

You told us once not to be in such a hurry to grow up, but I don't see any way we could have avoided it. There was always someone out there ready to carve away another chunk of our innocence. Maybe because theirs was already gone and they couldn't stand the sight of our ignorant happiness. Because that's what innocence is, you know. A blissful oblivion of what's coming, of what you'll lose and what you'll gain, and what kind of person you'll grow up to be.

No," I shout, because my mother doesn't know what I like anymore. "I don't eat things that bleed. Just cheese with lettuce or tomato and mayo. No dead fish or animals, please." "You see what I have to put up with?" my mother says.

Oh, baby girl," he says with a sigh. "I am so, so sorry.

real life isn't like the movies. The victim doesn't usually win. She just endures.

So sometimes what takes you down can be used to raise you up again.

I tore the crusts off my grilled cheese sandwich and set them aside to throw out for the birds. Their motives were pure -- hunger, thirst, shelter -- and they didn't mind leftovers.

All emotion receded, pulled out like low tide, leaving my brain an empty ocean bottom

If I allow my gaze to travel higher-which I won't-I'll see the solid gold basketball charm on a chain that my mother gave him for his eighteenth birthday nestled in his coarse, whorled chest hair. My front teeth throb as the memory of the charm bangs against them.

Being user friendly doesn't mean you're going to be loved.

What's the point of obsessing over cholesterol or bike helmets or even cigarettes when the biggest threats to our children are being released back into society every day?

How can you make someone love you when they won't? And what if that person happens to be your mother?

I hope someone will be lost without me someday.

It happened painfully and without warning, this sudden turning of the heart.

won't say anything, won't burst into tears and buckle under the weight of this last, awful straw.

The law says they aren't allowed to share the info with anyone else, but of course they did—who wouldn't?—so now we're marked for life. His picture is even posted on the New Jersey Sex Offender Internet Registry.

My mother plants her hands on her hips, peevish. "Is that the best welcome you can come up with? Why don't you come over here and give your father a hug?" Hug him? Touch him? How can she even suggest it?

It's okay. Don't push her, Sharon.